Jenkins Plugin for vRA 7!

Question: Does the Jenkins plugin for vRA 7.0 compete with vRealize Code Stream?

Answer: Absolutely not. The Jenkins plugin for vRA 7 is targeted at teams that need basic integration with Jenkins and vRA. The Jenkins plugin does not provide release management or release pipeline features. Teams requiring release management and release pipeline features should evaluate vRealize Code Stream to gain visibility and control over their release process.

Now that we’ve established the scope of the Jenkins plugin versus the rich features of vRealize Code Stream, lets cover a bit of history with vRA and Jenkins. Prior to vRA 7 and the Jenkins plugin you only had two options for integrating Jenkins with vRA.

CloudClient: The CloudClient for vRA can be used as an integration with Jenkins and vRA. While the cloud client for vRA is a great automation tool for vRA, it wasn’t a seamless integration with Jenkins. The CloudClient had to be installed on the Jenkins slaves and then called as a shell build step. Functional, but not really ideal.

vRealize Code Stream: Code Stream has an excellent plugin for Jenkins that allows you to kick off release pipelines which provision vRA blueprints. This is an excellent option for Code Stream users.

I’ll stress that the Jenkins plugin for vRA is only compatible with vRA 7. The release of vRA 7 brought enhancements to REST API that makes integrating REST calls with vRA 7 simple. If you are using an older version of vRA (5.x or 6.x) and want Jenkins integration, then you will have to use the CloudClient or Code Stream.

The Jenkins plugin for vRA 7 has been included in the official Jenkins plugin repository and can be installed just like any other Jenkins plugin. For instructions please visit the plugin’s wiki. The plugin is open source and the code is available on GitHub.